Legal Question in Entertainment Law in California
I have written a sequel to a very popular Hollywood movie without permission. I would like to pitch it to Spielberg. I do not intend to sell it or receive any profit from it except credit for the work I did. Is this okay? What will the attorneys at Universal Studios do or say to challenge me? Is my script copyrightable as a derivative work?
1 Answer from Attorneys
You wrote a spec script and you don't want to get paid for it? Whaddayou, nuts? The attorneys and everyone else at the studios will blow you off unless you approach them through an agent or attorney that they know and work with (not me). Get a list of agents from wga.org and, after you've polished the hell out of the script, registered it with WGAw, and have obtained positive feedback from other aspiring writers in your workshop, send it to one agent "over the transom." Do this one agent at a time.
If you can, change it a little bit so it isn't a derivative work, but when you pitch it, point out that it could be.
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